I just noticed something interesting today. The 1930 US Census asked people at what age they first got married. Here are the answers for my great grandfather William Solle and great grandmother Flora Sorenson Solle:
William and Flora got married in 1910, which is verified by their marriage certificate. In 1930, Flora was 42 and first got married at age 22. That matches up with the date of her marriage to William in 1910. However, William is 65 and first got married at age 42. That works out to be 1907, which is not when he married Flora.
Census information isn’t particularly accurate or exact. However, that’s intriguing enough that I now am going to start looking for possible records of an earlier marriage. I may have additional relatives I didn’t know about.
So here’s an interesting mystery. My grandmother was Lillian Solle. She was the daughter of William Solle, born in Springfield, Illinois in 1865, but moved to Madison sometime between 1900 and 1905. His father was an German immigrant from the Kingdom of Hanover (before Germany was a country), also named William Solle. Germany never centralized all the various records from all the principalities and kingdoms after it federated into the German Empire. So there’s not a whole lot of genealogy records online from Germany. If I ever want to dig into the German branches of the family, it’s not going to be easy like it has been with Sweden or Denmark. Consequently, I haven’t pursued much about the Solle family.
But now I kinda want to.
Solle is not a very common name in the U.S. Searching for “Solle” in Madison newspapers brings up only 732 hits. I haven’t looked through all of them, but I have poked around a lot. One was an item from the 26 Jun 1924 Capital Times about the Solles (Flora, Lillian, and William Jr.) visiting relatives in St. Louis. Much of the text is faded in the microfilm and unreadable. But it mentions a cousin, Dr. Walter Solle. I’d previously noted that and promptly forgot about it. Found my notation yesterday and searched a bit.
Solles visit St Louis
The first thing I did was search for Walter Solle in the immigration databases on Ancestry.com. Though I can’t read the text of the article, it mentions Germany so I assumed he was visiting from Germany. And there are a lot of passenger manifests post 1900. Bingo. He arrived from Germany in New York on the ship Albert Ballin in May 1924, a month before the trip to St. Louis. And the manifest lists William Solle of Madison as his cousin, so I know this isn’t a different Walter Solle.
Walter Solle lines on Albert Ballin passenger manifest
The interesting thing here is that he lists his occupation as political economist. Which would be cool, because the world of political economy really wasn’t that large in the 1920s.
There’s also a second manifest with him on it from 1927, coming from Germany again. This time he’s listed as a merchant, and he’s also a resident alien.
I did a narrower search for Walter Solle in the Madison newspapers. If he’s living in Madison now, they were likely to have written about him at some point. Bingo. On 28 July 1924, the Capital Times had an article about him moving to the U.S.
Walter Solle to live in Madison
Only instead of being a political economist list he was a couple of months earlier, now his profession is a composer. The article goes into some detail about his exploits in the German Army during World War I. Since the source for those tales was likely Walter Solle himself, I’d tend to take them with a grain of salt.
Anyhow, all I know about Walter Solle is contained in those four items. He doesn’t show up in the 1930 Census. No other mentions I could find quickly in the Madison newspapers. Did he return to Germany? Did he die? What was his real profession?
A great source of information for my family genealogy has been burial records. I don’t mean lists of tombs in cemeteries, though those have been a good source too. Some cemeteries have put their burial records online, and they have been awesome.
The first relevant cemetery I found that did this is Forest Hill Cemetery in Madison. I stumbled on this last summer. They don’t put original copies of their records online, but at some point they transcribed everything into electronic form and that is there. Here’s what they had for my great grandfather, William Solle:
Burial record for William Solle
Prior to finding that, I’d thought he’d died in 1945, as that’s the year I was told. Mind you, the information isn’t all correct. For instance, the record states that there is no monument and no marker. I’ve been there and have photographed the marker.
Brigham City Cemetery and Ogden City Cemetery in Utah have also transcribed their records, including parents and spouses of the deceased. Evergreen Cemetery in Colorado Springs put a listing of their burials online too. Theirs has plot location and year of burial, and sometimes birth and death dates.
Even though I don’t have any relations buried at the grounds, Lake View Cemetery locally put their records online.
Most of the ones that put their records online are government owned cemeteries. A lot of private cemeteries will charge anyone but family wanting to look up where a grave is. I find that kind of irritating.
I found a really fun one last week though. The Solle family originally settled in Springfield, Illinois. There are a number of them buried in Calvary Cemetery. I came across a set of interment records for Oak Ridge Cemetery last week. Curiously, all the Solles are listed in their records. I don’t know why this is, but perhaps the two cemeteries were jointly managed for a while. I don’t know. Anyway, this was an awesome find because this set of records are scans of the original burial log books. They include age, date of death, location of death, and cause of death.
Edit: I found out why they are listed in Oak Ridge Cemetery in the official records but Calvary Cemetery elsewhere. The two cemeteries abut each other, and there isn’t clear demarcation in all places. Years ago, someone inventoried graves in Calvary Cemetery and the Sangamon County Genealogical Society posted their list. However, due to the lack of a good boundary, they included some markers from Oak Ridge in their list, including my family. Then people copied that list to other places, and so the misinformation spread.
Here’s the page for my second great grandmother, Maria Solle.
Burial record for Maria Solle
One obstacle to using these records is that the Illinois Digital Archives decided to display these images one section at a time.
Row 2, image 1 of page containing Maria Solle burial record
No problem. I downloaded all the pieces and started lining them up. But that was very time consuming. Thanks to the lazyweb (specifically Fes) I found Microsoft Image Composite Editor. It’s made for stitching together panoramas, but these is a very easy case of the same problem. I simply dropped in all the pieces and it sorts and merges them, though I had to adjust things once or twice. There are a few old maps that I can get pieces of online the same way, so this is gonna be a great tool.
And here’s a bonus for reading this far. Oak Ridge Cemetery is where Abraham Lincoln was buried. Like everyone else there, the cemetery entered his information in the log book. Here’s the re-assembled page. I’m sure someone else on the internet has already done this, but I couldn’t find it.
My father, George Robert Weiss, died in 1972, when I was 2 years old and my brother Dan was yet to be born. For years, I believed that he’d died of lung cancer. It’s probably the biggest contributing motivation to me never wanting to start smoking. I have no memories of him. My first recollections are from 1974 or early 1975 at the house in which we lived on Phinney Ridge.
Unlike the Hathaway side, information on the Weiss side of the family was a little harder to come by. First is that my father died and mom remarried. The second is that Grandpa Weiss divorced in the mid 1960s and we had no contact with my grandmother. I suppose that my aunts and possibly even my grandfather would have told me anything I wanted to know, but I was too young to know I’d ever be interested.
The key about all this is that mom never really talked about the Weisses all that much. Daddy George was just a name growing up. We had various get togethers with my aunts and cousins, but my only contact with more extended Weiss family was with Steve and his wife Connie. Steve is my dad’s cousin who moved to Portland from the ancestral family home in Wisconsin.
Weiss Family Memory Book
About 6 years ago, my two Weiss aunts put together a book of information about the Weiss family. My grandmother died in 2001, and I think that spurred them to make this. I got my copy around Christmas 2004. It’s mostly a photo book with some information. There’s a photo of my great great grandparents, the Sorensons. There’s a few of my great grandparents, the Solles. There’s one of my great grandmother Weiss. Lots of photos of my grandfather, many of them taken in uniform. He was a navy enlistee in the 1920s and became an officer in the 1930s through World War II. Then lots of photos of my dad and his siblings, and their respective husbands and kids, and a sprinkling of Connie and Steve’s family.
It’s main purpose was memories for us. It has the only photos I possess of anyone in the Weiss family taken before I was born. But Aunt Jane and Aunt Sue did put some genealogical information in it too. There’s a copy of my great grandparents’ marriage certificate. There’s a list of my grandfather’s siblings. And there’s a couple of death certificates in the back.
The biggest surprise for me was that my father did not die of lung cancer like I believed. I’m sure he had cancer in his lungs and that was the proximate cause. The death certificate lists testicular cancer as the cause of death. And here I was avoiding smoking because I thought I was especially prone to lung cancer. I also found out that part of my family was Danish (the Sorensons), and part was French (the Solles). I knew the Weisses were German, because it’s a German name.
A couple of years ago, my great aunt Babe turned 100. This was right in the middle of the last months of mom’s life, so I wasn’t able to make her birthday party in Madison. I wish I could have. This year when I went to Wiscon in May, I paid a visit to her after the conference. She’s 102 now, and lives in the house where she was born (or moved to shortly afterward). That house will have to be torn down after she dies. It’s functional, but beyond repair or renovation. As of this summer, she didn’t even have 24 hour care. Just caregivers there during daylight hours. Her Alzheimer’s is pretty bad though. She didn’t remember me or my dad. She talked about Arch (my grandfather) some. But we had the same conversation about 10 times in the couple hours I was there. After a few minutes, she would start the conversation over where it began because she couldn’t remember what we’d talked about. I’ll stop by again this May around Wiscon again. She isn’t in great health, but she’s a tough bird, so I expect she’ll be around still. And hopefully she’ll have a little more lucid of a weekend. Armed with a few facts, I will attempt to get her to talk about old times.
I’ll write some more about the informational details shortly, but that’s the introduction.
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